It appears to me that it is a version compatibility issue between bower and npm engine. npm version is 1.2.17 on Openshift and other platforms like Heroku and Cloudcontrol are on 1.4.x, there bower install works like a charm. Is there a way in Openshift to upgrade npm engine?
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prasunMay 30 '14 at 20:43

well, for each time you need to use bower install, you can use export HOME=$HOME/app-root/runtime/repo in the RHC tool, and then into the folder './app-root/repo' you can use the bower install, if bower command is not available, go to folder './nodejs' and do npm install bower.